You can count on social media for a lot of things; scarily targeted ads, increasingly absurd memes (Darius Bellpeppa, anyone?), a general decline in your mental wellbeing, but most importantly, all the juiciest celeb gossip. And I’m not just talking about my own feed here.
On TikTok, the search term ‘Celebrity Gossip’ gives you some 188 million posts and counting, covering everything from celebrities’ Starbucks orders (Kim Kardashian’s is a small white mocha) to salacious cheating scandals. Similarly, over on Instagram, there’s an endless stream of speculative celeb content to meet an unquenchable thirst for piping hot tea.
And while we no longer have to shell out a few coins at the newsagency to get our fix of hot celeb goss, that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made – on the contrary. Speculating, snooping and surveilling celebrities and influencers, which are now arguably one and the same, has become an incredibly profitable business anyone can participate in.
Anonymous celebrity gossip account @DeuxMoi is at the forefront of this burgeoning market with its more than two million captivated Instagram followers, myself unashamedly included. The self-proclaimed “curators of pop culture” have been in the game for quite some time, but it wasn’t until the beginning of Covid that the account experienced its meteoric rise to digital notoriety.
The juicy ‘blind items’ (the anonymous tips that have become the bread and butter of celeb gossip accounts) on big names like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Kylie Jenner were like catnip to all of us socially isolated and gossip-deprived people stuck in lockdown. Not to mention the air of mystery and intrigue we’d been primed for ever since Gossip Girl hit our screens back in 2007.
But who’s behind accounts like @DeuxMoi and why do people start them in the first place?
While @DeuxMoi remains a faceless outlet for celebrity and influencer gossip, Amber Paul is front and centre of her page @influencer.updates.au. Dubbed “Australia’s very own Gossip Girl” by The Sydney Morning Herald, Amber’s account has earned a faithful following of 64.4k on Instagram and 71.3k on TikTok since she created it back in 2020.
The 33-year-old from Geelong, whose fake last name is both a tribute to well-known Aussie influencer Anna Paul and a way to protect the privacy of her two children, says she began the account during the height of Covid to find a community of like-minded people.
“I would message my friends and sister about influencers regularly but found they didn’t care as much as I did,” she admits, “so, I decided to create a place where I could talk about all the interesting things I was seeing from influencers each day. The account following grew quickly and I soon created the community I had been searching for.”
In finding her community in the thousands, Amber not only found fellow influencer-obsessed people but also a new career, with the account becoming her full-time job paid for by a subscription-style model through Instagram’s Close Friends feature. However, when your subject matter is influencers with a vested interest in keeping their personal brand pretty and polished, it can’t all be smooth sailing.
“I have been threatened once in my DM’s so [I] removed a story as I realised I had made assumptions and perhaps what I said wasn’t true,” she tells me.
“I have also been served a legal letter to my house. After speaking to a lawyer and being told the letter is based on no legal grounds, I didn’t hear from the influencer again.”
Despite public perception that gossip accounts like Influencer Updates Au exist to cancel public figures, Amber says she actually despises cancel culture and that her account doesn’t exist to call influencers out nor hold them to account, unlike others such as fashion’s favourite watchdog @DietPrada or, in a more light-hearted and comical sense, @celeb_spellcheck, which has sadly been very quiet these days, although I’m certain it’s not for lack of content.
Instead, Amber says her account exists to inform others of the interesting things Australian influencers are doing by resharing what they have already publicly shared. Because, evidently, there are thousands if not more, who want to know.
But, in the familiar words of a straight white man who can’t comprehend being invested in anything other than sports: why do we even care what they’re doing anyway?
Hannah Ferguson, the CEO and founder of independent Australian news commentary platform, Cheek Media Co., argues our insatiable appetite for not just gossip, but any tidbits of information, in the digital age, is by design.
“I think that this point of access that we now have for free means that we are being trained by our algorithms to become attached to people that we don’t know or have known in our lives in such an invasive way,” she explains. This could be someone you went to high school with but haven’t spoken to in years or a celebrity you’ll never meet.
Hannah believes this attachment comes with a level of parasocial entitlement, or in other words, an unreasonable expectation for more access and more connection from the one-sided digital relationships we forge with celebrities, influencers and people distantly in our orbit. It doesn’t matter that these people may not even know our names; when we feel like we know a person, emotions are invested.
We see this parasocial entitlement play out time and time again when an influencer moves away from chronically oversharing online or when a celebrity demands respect and privacy from their fans, like in the case of Chappell Roan. Some will click the unfollow button while others will dig their heels in and say, ‘But this is what you signed up for.’
However, it’s not just movie stars or those with over a million Instagram followers who become entangled in the growing web of parasocial relationships. Anyone with a public presence, AKA a social media account, can find themselves entangled too.
“We don’t just read an article by an author anymore or have a news presenter. We have people that we attach to as a personality,” Hannah explains. “We therefore then agree or disagree with their opinions and that actually pervades our view of them as a person as well… It’s just this huge web of interest and engagement that’s not driven by a particular fandom necessarily but just by access.”
James Hall, an Arts and Humanities lecturer at Edith Cowan University, also believes that increased access has granted us increased capacity to engage with gossip. However, while some gossip accounts provide harmless feed fodder (like Kim Kardashian’s Starbucks order) others invite everyday people to participate in paparazzi antics.
“Feeds like Deuxmoi actively encourage stalking of celebrities, as if they’re birds or trains that need to be spotted which is not really a way to treat people,” he says. “There’s also this undercurrent that celebrities forgo any sense of privacy by being a celebrity, which is not a contract anyone has signed.”
But just like how anyone with an Instagram account can become the target of parasocial entitlement, celebrities aren’t the only ones on the receiving end of paparazzi antics. In recent times, people have taken to social media to report on the supposed wrongdoings of total strangers, a concept described by The Guardian as ‘gossip surveillance.’
They’re the types of videos that start with ‘If your name is so-and-so and you live in X neighbourhood, you should know that I heard…’ and end with a life-changing piece of information like ‘Your husband is cheating on you’ or ‘Your supposed best friends actually hate you’.
Some may argue that exposing cheaters or bad friends is ultimately for the greater good and therefore justifies the practice of gossip surveillance. Unfortunately, it all too often comes at the expense of the affected person whose private life is broadcast for the world to see and deliberate on in the comment section – not to mention the privacy of the ‘wrongdoers’ who were unaware they were being eavesdropped on or possibly even recorded in the first place.
This greater good defence becomes even murkier when you consider the fact that social media apps like TikTok reward this type of content with views and engagement, which we all know holds the alluring promise of dopamine and dollar signs.
From a viewer’s perspective, these types of videos are hard to scroll by; we all want to know what happens next, even if that happens to be the breakdown of someone’s relationship.
It begs the question: does our need for attention and validation outweigh our ability to empathise with others or even respect their privacy? In this strange new age of social media, are we really any better than the tabloids that came before us?
“There is certainly an element of dissonance in terms of how we deal with these things,” James says. “It is so much easier to say no to someone over email as opposed to telling them to their face. It’s so much easier to gossip about others when we can’t see the whites of anyone else’s eyes.”